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Monthly Archives: April 2018

Journey to Montgomery (Part 1 of a series) My daughter, Annie, and I just spent two days in Montgomery at the opening of the Equal Justice Initiative’sLegacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration andThe National Memorial for Peace and Justice,which covers a small hilltop above Alabama’s capital city. It is an extraordinarily uplifting name for what […]

Disclosure: Pete McCloskey, of whom I wrote in my last blog, is married to a friend of mine. The real founder of Earth Day in 1970 was a great progressive Democrat, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. He wanted Earth Day, set for April 22nd, the same day as Arbor Day, to be a bipartisan and […]

*Pogo comic strip, Earth Day, 1971 Sunday was a big day, at least for me: it was both the 48thEarth Day and my grandson’s third birthday, and I hope Jamie grows up to take good care of both of us. Although the day seemed to lacked the enthusiasm of earlier times, when many of our […]

“I know how much is enough,” a friend of mine once said to me. “It’s just a little more than you have right now.” And that, in two short simple sentences, is what drives the American Dream. Or at least it did until recently, when many dreamers woke up to find that a few people […]

“And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country,” John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961. It has become increasingly clear that many Americans no longer buy into the American dream. From the perspective of national unity and morale, this is not […]

Yesterday 24/7 Wall Street published a piece on the “Most (and Least) Healthy Countries in the World.”The rankings are based on an index that measures four variables: “life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and incidence of tuberculosis.” The ten healthiest countries include the usual suspects from Scandinavia (Iceland #1; Finland #2; Sweden #7; and Norway #8), […]

“What was once a startling observation among our team of ecosystem modelers is now common knowledge: over the course of a decade, the Gulf of Maine warmed faster than 99% of the global ocean.” Gulf of Maine Research Institute Let’s connect the dots. It is an observable scientific fact that the Gulf of Maine is warming […]

Up near the northwest corner of New York’s Central Park, across from the intersection of 106th Street and Central Park West, stands The Strangers’ Gate, one of 20 named entrances to the park, which was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. If you pass through the gate and climb the 77 […]

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Langston Hughes As I wrote last time, the Knight Foundation recently reported the lowest levels of trust in our government since Gallup began tracking the issue sixty years ago. In 1964, for example, 74 percent of Americans trusted the federal […]

James G. Blaine

Most of us undervalue what seem our tiny contributions to our communities and the world. As a result, we feel powerless, even victimized. But, like the butterfly effect in science, the lives we lead with our families, in our communities, and at work – all the so-called little things we do – collectively change the world. As I grow older, my ambition grows more modest but not less important: to participate fully and to contribute what I can. That’s my goal with this blog.